Gallery News and Events

The little park outside the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, the site of a major turning point in the gay rights movement nearly 50 years ago, became a permanent beacon last year when it was named a national historic monument.

But those who remember the night Stonewall patrons defiantly clashed with the police have dwindled over the years. Their stories risk going untold.

On Sunday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York announced a $1 million grant from Google.org, the internet giant’s philanthropic wing, to The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, to start a project preserving the oral histories and human experiences of the people who stood up and fought back during those tense days in 1969. The initiative is in conjunction with the National Park Foundation, which will create an educational curriculum for students and a digital platform intended to magnify the reach of the monument beyond the small triangle of parkland in the West Village.

“The purpose is to spread the word about the Stonewall uprising and the progress we have made as well as the distance we have to go,” Mr. Schumer said. “And it sends a great message to Washington, especially in these times: We celebrate our diversity and cherish it, we don’t shrink from it and we don’t fear it.”

On the night of June 28, 1969, Martin Boyce was at the Stonewall Inn on the gay haven of Christopher Street. Mr. Boyce and other patrons fought back when police arrived for one of their near-nightly stops at the bar, lining up customers and arresting several for what seemed like arbitrary reasons.

“The only place we had to go was Christopher Street,” said Mr. Boyce, now 69 and a chef living in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan. “Christopher Street was the one place you didn’t have to look behind you, it was all your people. Here was the one spot we had — now raided and ruined.” When the police told a group to disperse, he remembers, that night they advanced instead. “People who didn’t even want to do this, they just wanted to be free,” he said.

The idea for the project came from William Floyd, Google’s head of external affairs for New York, who lives with his husband in Chelsea and walks past the Stonewall Inn when he takes his young son to school. Unlike some other national monuments, Stonewall commemorates a struggle that continues to evolve, he said.

“This is a living, breathing, active thing,” he said. “It’s not like Mount Rushmore or a physical natural thing of beauty, it’s civil rights. We thought it was really important that we could provide money and technology to capture those voices and help amplify them.”

One of the voices will probably come from Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt. As a teenager in the ’60s, he had run away from home in Linden, N.J. Stonewall was a refuge, he said, explaining how he ended up as one of the self-described “street kids” who joined the fray that night.

“It happened spontaneously, and it happened mostly because of the civil rights movement in the ’60s that broke ground before it, and the women’s movement,” said Mr. Lanigan-Schmidt, now 69 and an artist. “They created a mentality that’s about freedom and being a full person. When we were in the street that night, that exchange of ideas had built up to that point. Everyone became a fighter pretty quick.”

The Stonewall project will join a group of similar initiatives by Google to preserve oral history. In conjunction with the Equal Justice Initiative, a group working to end mass incarceration, Google has funded a project that documents stories of lynching through the descendants of those who were murdered.

Though the $1 million donation is significant, the West Village’s gay center still needs to raise money to pay for components of a monument like an informational kiosk in the park. The goal is $2 million, which the Park Foundation is raising. Mr. Floyd said Google’s donation would cover things like the oral history component, a social media platform for visitors to share their stories, and educational aspects, which Google is best suited to support.

“My hope is that we transform the scale and the reach of the Stonewall National Monument from a physical location to really a shared experience,” said Glennda Testone, the executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. “What we want to do is make sure that that inspiration and that touchstone is available to everybody, wherever they may live in the world.”

NEW YORK –MARC STRAUS is proud to announce that Doug Argue has joined the gallery, where an exhibition of new paintings will open in early 2018.

New York City-based artist Doug Argue’s thirty-year painting career has culminated in a well-known and recognizable body of work that range from pure abstraction to representation. His compositions have a sense of rhythm, as though music and dance is pulsing through.

In his most recent work, Argue integrates words or phrases culled from literary classics such as Moby-Dick to sonnets by thirteenth century poet Petrarch. Letters are individually stretched, skewed and rotated, and then each painted over the underlying image conferring a narrative to the work, elusive perhaps, a story which is accessible if only we knew the key.

Argue comments, “There are many different histories in the world, in both art and politics, and we often see things in the current moment, yet have no idea what lies beneath. One language is always turning into another, one generation is always rising and another falling, there is no still moment. I am trying to express this flux—this constant shifting of one thing over another, like a veil over the moment itself.”

A well-known early painting by Argue depicts a massive chicken factory shed filled with thousands of caged chickens. This work was prompted in part by a short story of Franz Kafka in which a dog contemplates where the world gets its food. It is again on view and the centerpiece at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.

Marc Straus, Founder and Owner of the Lower East Side gallery, said, “Too often the careers of abstract artists are abbreviated. Often because the work is about an idea and not about how a painting is made. Rothko, Guston, Newman, Rothenberg, and Richter cared about every brushwork. Their power came from how the paint was put on. So too for over 20 years I have watched Doug Argue embrace the craft of painting, every letter and mark matter. But he is also a storyteller who in the end makes art that is personal and powerful.”

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Argue’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including at Edelman Arts and Haunch of Venison in New York and the Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica. Two of his new monumental paintings commissioned for the lobby of One World Trade Center in Manhattan are now on display. His work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, and numerous other museums, corporate and private collections. Argue has been the recipient of multiple awards including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1995) and the Rome Prize (1997).

Britt Boutros Ghali’s latest exhibition “Women of MyWorld” is replete with subtle resonances, and I am confident that it cause a stir in Cairo. These are women with pluralistic instincts. Do not anticipate replicas of Spanish Cubist Pablo Picasso’s Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers). True, Picasso as a man, painted his women with tremendous verve. A man paints women somewhat differently than how a woman paints women. Picasso’s “Version O”, the final painting in the series of Women of Algiers, painted in 1955 was first sold for $31.9 million in November 1997, as part of the Ganz collection, at Christie’s in New York. “Version O” was auctioned at Christie’s New York for a second time in May 2015 and at a pre-sale valuation of $140 million was one of the highest ever placed on an auctioned artwork. For Boutros Ghali, the instinctive cerebral impetus outstripped the innate visual.

Her works resonate with the essence of femininity, and especially the role that spirituality and ethics endow women with a particular avocation, a calling rather than a pastime. Mothering, raising families and as the artist tells me “loving and caring for men”. Her works are curiously quinquennial in the sense that her women focus on five attributes of the feminine. First and foremost, she insists, on love and loving. “I do not consider myself a feminist,” she confides to me. There is an energy and zing in her women. Most are physically beautiful in an ethereal fashion.

“My women come to me. I believe they are reincarnations of women in previous eras, who want to tell the stories of their past lives for me to present them in contemporary settings,” Boutros Ghali tells Al-Ahram Weekly.

Her women are painted with passion, and they are down to earth. she does not take into account only white, aristocratic, and elitist perspectives. They are neither ethnically specific nor do they express multi-culturalist forms of feminism. Her words were reminiscent of the African American term “Womanism”, the second aspect of her five pillars.

For black women, achieving suffrage was a way to counter the disfranchisement of the men of their race, and this is precisely how Britt Boutros Ghali envisages the essence of womanhood. Even though she is Norwegian, hers are women of colour. Some are black but the majority are what one might describe as off-white.

“I come from northern Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle. We have four months of darkness throughout the day in winter, and four months of continuous daylight during summer. The “Northern Lights” are magical, and southern Norwegians see us northerners as wild and boisterous, a trifle psychotic,” she extrapolates.

The term womanism was first coined by African American author and intellectual Alice Walker in her 1979 short story, “Coming Apart”.

The women suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, promoting women’s right to vote, were important. But Britt Boutros Ghali is acutely aware that certain women, and in particular among the aristocratic elite are content to be housewives, or to be more precise women of leisure.

“They are prone to malicious gossip because they have no vocation. And, they treat their servants atrociously. One such woman visited my atelier, and pompously pointed out four painting that she said she would purchase. We agreed on a date and a time. Of course, she never showed up. So I took the painting to the Picasso Gallery, in preparation for the exhibition. She suddenly stormed into my atelier and demanded the paintings, and I told her point blank that they were already hanging in the exhibition. She was horrified and rushed to the Picasso Gallery were she promptly purchased the paintings,” the artist expounded.

The incident itself is illuminating. Just as Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden’s: Womanist Prose is revealing. Walker is credited with coining the term “womanist.”, but other African American women who rejected feminism soon took up the term, and articulated the meaning and implications of the interlocking oppression of race, gender, and class.

Walker categorically stated that “I don’t choose womanism because it is “better” than feminism...I choose it because I prefer the sound, the feel, the fit of it”. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi concurred. “A white woman writer may be a Feminist, but a black woman writer is likely to be a Womanist.” The same applies to art. Indeed, Boutros Ghali insists that she is no “feminist”, the third of her five pillars. She paints women because she believes that women are capable of expressing much love. But, she insists that some women are also a source of destruction and terror. An embittered woman can raise a generation of beastly men. She believes in the power of women, whether for good or for evil. The mother is the educator. As such she draws upon the actions of women as the primary, primeval protagonists who make or break their progeny’s lives.

The Japanese-American Betty Tsurusta’s landmark The Womanish Roots of Womanism: A Culturally-Derived and African-Centered Ideal explicitly spells out the essence of womanism. The appellation allows women of colour to affirm and celebrate their colour and culture in a way that feminism does not. And, the women painted by Britt Boutros Ghali sensitively express the sentiment expressed by Womanists.

Womanism, after all, is a social theory deeply rooted in the racial and gender oppression of women of colour.

Face-recognition technologies can be informative about the persona of an individual. And, every painting of the artist in the exhibition has character and a unique personality of her own.

Racist phrenology, now regarded as an obsolete amalgamation of primitive neuroanatomy, where the skull is supposed to determine an individual’s psychological attributes.Britt Boutros Ghali has no time for such racism. And, the artist abhors such outdated theories, and yet she pays meticulous care to the features of her women, the fourth pillar, of this particular artist’s quinquennial perspective. Phrenology was largely discredited as a scientific theory by the 1840s. Phrenologists believe that the human mind has a set of various mental faculties. Racist theorists argued that Australian Aborigines, for instance, had no cerebral organ for producing great artists, and the same can be said of the indigenous Sami people of northern Scandinavia, the Nordic countries in general and parts of northeastern Russia. The Sami are traditionally known in English as Lapps, or Laplanders.

The artist has had numerous encounters with Sami shamans, some who have predicted landmark experiences in her own life. Shamans visit her regularly when she is in Norway, and they always turn up when she is in dire need of their spiritual guidance. She is in awe of such spiritual guides and practitioners of the natural elements. The Sami of northern Norway are at one with their harsh natural surroundings. Their nomadic reindeer herding lifestyle is their hallmark. Their high cheek bones, short and stocky stature, and almond shaped eyes distinguish them racially from other Norwegians.

Physiognomy, the assessment of a person’s character or personality from his or her outer appearance, especially the face is presumably a notion that the artist does not object to. First, she believes that some of her women are embittered, or more precisely where morose or melancholy, and deeply disaffected in a previous life. Others are serene, confident in their charm and charisma.

Boutros Ghali delineates her women’s features, whatever their race. Most of her women are Egyptian, but many are African, and there are the odd Asians, too. Second, in aggregate they are characteristically not dissimilar regardless of their race, One can invariably identify a Britt Boutros Ghali woman, and they do have a uniqueness common enough that distinguishing them is critically important.

Britt Boutros Ghali pays attention to features in each face.

The eyes, eyebrows, lips and nose are swank.And, also, the jewelry, dress and appurtenances stand out. “My women tell me when not to apply any more make-up, and some eschew ornaments altogether, dismissing such trinkets as knickknack”. Even those of her women who are obviously not particularly wealthy have a certain ritzy panache.

Naive painting is pejoratively dismissed as art which is without a formal training or degree. Yet, great artists such as Paul Gauguin are considered “naive painters”. Boutros Ghali, like Gauguin is distinguished by her experimental deployment of colour and synthetist style to highlight the individual characteristics of her women.

Many of Boutros Ghali’s women are reminiscent of Gauguin’s Vahine no te tiare or “Woman with a Flower”. Egypt for Boutros Ghali is what Tahiti was for Gauguin. Vahine, the Tahitian word for “woman” has echoes of Boutros Ghali’s “Women of My World”.

Incidentally, like Gauguin’s Danish wife Mette-Sophie Gad, Boutros Ghali is Scandinavian, and like Mette she was towards the end of her late husband Raouf’s life, the family’s chief breadwinner. However, while Mette eventually divorced Gauguin, Boutros Ghali stuck to Raouf to the bitter end.

Boutros Ghali’s Parisian life inculcated in her a love of art. Her favourite His Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter who like Boutros Ghali also had an inspirational Parisian sojourn. Munch was particularly impressed by Gauguin’s “reaction against realism”. Munch was a post-impressionist synthetist aesthetic like Gauguin. And, I dare say, like Britt Boutros Ghali herself.

Leon Löwentraut comes to New York

Bodega de la Haba is presenting a German art-world sensation Leon Löwentraut's first US exhibition at Avant Garde LES in association with Edelman Arts. Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, November 18th at 6 pm.

LEON LÖWENTRAUT: TRÄUMEREIEN

AVANT GARDE LES

319 GRAND STREET

OPENING RECEPTION: NOVEMBER 18TH

NOVEMBER 16TH - NOVEMBER 28TH

CURATED BY GREGORY DE LA HABA

WHO ON EARTH IS LEON LÖWENTRAUT? | A QUIET LUNCH INTERVIEW

Nov. 4, 2016

We've been hearing about him for more than a year. This wunderkinder out of Düsseldorf, Germany, media darling and art world sensation since the age of seven. Multiple sold-out shows in his native land before his sixteenth birthday and by his seventeenth, Leon Löwentraut would take his hyper-expressionist pop paintings overseas for two solo, sold-out exhibitions: one in London, at Knotting Hill's Muse Gallery, the other in Singapore at Bruno Gallery. And last month in Basel, at Galerie Loeffel, every Löwentraut canvas on the gallery's walls were scooped-up by collectors within fifteen minutes from the show's opening. Impressive, indeed.

But who is he? And why does he have over 7000 adoring fans on Facebook and a free, Leon Löwentraut app downloadable in the Apple Store? What's his shtick? As it turns out, our very own publisher/writer, Gregory de la Haba, was asked to curate this boy wonder's first stateside exhibition at Avant Garde LES. And since de la Haba loves a good story, he enthusiastically embraced the offer to do so and in the interim find out exactly who, or what, this Leon Löwentraut is made of.

QL: Hello, Leon. Welcome to New York. Now tell us, please, who you are and when did you start painting?LL: Hello, I am Leon Löwentraut, a painter from Düsseldorf. I started painting at seven years old. My mother, an amateur painter, created these wonderful naturalistic landscapes and I loved to watch her paint and she was the first to put the paintbrush in my hand. I haven't stopped painting since.QL: So you started painting early-as a child-but when did you realize you wanted to be an artist?LL: When I was a child, I remember visiting a friend of my grandfather's who was an artist and walking into his studio and seeing these large canvases with bright colors that I found so amazing and exciting and to this day I never forgot them -although I did forget this artist's name, sadly. This was around the same time I started painting with my mother and between the experience of being in a real artist's studio with massive, bright paintings and a mother providing me the tools necessary to begin, I knew very early that I wanted nothing else other than to paint and create works of art on canvas. I'm still learning about being an artist.QL: What is your daily schedule like? School in the morning, painting in the evening?LL: Yes, exactly. I wake every day at 6:30 for school, come home, do homework and then start painting right away, often till very late. Painting is very calming and I enjoy it tremendously. My goal each morning when I wake is to work on one painting each evening. And I do. But I finished school this summer and I feel very good. Now I can concentrate all my power for painting!

QL: I like that, 'all my power'. Good for you. Where is your studio, Leon?LL: It is in the cellar of my parent's home near Düsseldorf at Meerbusch-Büderich.QL: You paint in the cellar of your parent's home?LL: Yes, why? Is that a problem?QL: No, not at all. I love it. The rumblings in the European press painted you as a spoiled kid and I assumed you probably had a ten thousand square foot studio in Berlin or Leipzig. With assistants to boot.LL: Ha, ha, no. I paint everything myself, thank you, and work at home.QL: Tell me what dead artist you admire and one living artist you admire?

LL: Well, I admire four dead artists: Picasso, Basquiat, Pollock and Warhol. Each completely different with their own style and attitude and attitude matters a lot to me. I'm not a fan of the drugs Basquiat took but god do I love his attitude, his force in expression on canvas, pure genius, raw genius. With Picasso, I loved most his marketing genius as well as his line. With Pollock, I like that it took him a while to find himself, I find this very hopeful. Unfortunately, he had to drink too much to mask the fact that he didn't have his unique style early on and that he was insecure, I believe. But when he found his own style he really killed it, yes?QL: He sure did.LL: And with Warhol, I love his erscheinungsbild, how do you say this in English?QL: His appearance?LL: Yes, his appearance, his style and connection with fashion and art, I really like that and admire when someone has the ability to really create their own persona as he did with his trademark wig and glasses plus make art that looked like no one elses before him. Amazing, no?

QL: Totally. And what living artist do you admire?LL: I haven't met Gerhard Richter yet but he would definitely be my favorite!QL: And I saw that you did meet Julian Schnabel. Was he nice?LL: Yes, he was great. Very nice. I met him when he had his opening in Germany and we talked and traded emails. And I showed him my work. He was very impressed about my pictures for my age and loved also the colors very much.QL: Well that's impressive to have Julian Schnabel look at your work and have something nice to say about it. Good for you. You carry yourself well, confidently, people see that, are drawn to that and I'm sure has contributed to your tremendous success, no?LL: Yes, but confidence also comes from working hard and this is what I do most.QL: Bingo! A solid work ethic is key to success. But what do you contribute your commercial success to?LL: It's very rare to sell paintings for certain prices and I also know that it is not normal and I thank god for my luck and I am very thankful about it. Nonetheless, I work very hard all the time and make well thought-out decisions and plans about my career. I'm constantly asking myself and those around me who know better what more I can do better in regards to marketing, selling and what art shows are best for me to participate. I believe people respond to my work and purchase it because I work from my guts, my soul. I'm not creating art to make money and I'd really like to believe people see that and feel it. They enjoy the honesty of my work.

QL: With success come the haters and you seem to have a few. Tell me about the negative press you've gotten. Do you care? And, what are they saying about you in Germany?LL: I don't care about negative press, but sometimes it's good; people want to read about bad things and they also want to see that successful people collapse. Sometimes they wrote that my parents just want to make me famous which is pure bullshit. My parents care about their son and wish for me to succeed, plain and simple. They do no more or less than what parents of a talented athlete would do for their son or daughter. How many parents around the world are driving their children miles and miles for proper training or to play in competitive games, yes? Or what about musically inclined children and the hours and hours devoted to practice every day? What parent doesn't wish success for their child? The difference is my parents take me to participate in art shows and exhibitions instead of football games to play. They see how hard I work with my art. I paint everyday. It's a true passion for me. My critics also say I'm just dreaming and don't know how the real life is. They're right. I'm not as old as them (laughs). And they can say whatever they want. I'll take my dreams over their criticism any day (laughs). It's all part of the journey, yes, Gregory?QL: It most certainly is, Leon. I commend you for seeing it so lightly and not being negatively affected by it. Tell me what the act of painting means to you? Why do you paint?LL: I paint because it is my passion. I'll paint for two weeks straight and then it might catch up to me and I'll get tired and need to rest but when resting I start to get anxious and need to start painting again soon. I'm always thinking about paintings. Another thing, I do not speak very well about my feelings, I tend to be quiet about them in this regard, but in my paintings I find it very easy to express my feelings and emotions. Normally, with friends and family, I am the extrovert. I love to have fun and meet people. But when I paint, I'm a complete introvert and prefer to be left alone to work.QL: When I look at your work, I see expressive linear mark-making -something akin to the way graffiti artists 'tag' a wall or a NYC subway train. Tell me about your process, your approach to picture making. Tell me about the layering of paint (oil or acrylic?), tell me about the surface, the ground and how you feel about paint. What turns you on about art and being a painter?LL: When I was a kid between the ages of 6-10, I had many books on graffiti art and I sometimes tried to copy these graffiti lines and styles. I work in acrylic on white primed fabric and usually listen to music and almost always just begin working without much premeditated thought. I just do it. Sometimes I have a subject in mind or a theme or the thought of a girl gets me going and sometimes before I paint I might make a sketch in pencil. But I love to work at night and go right at it. I can honestly say that art and being a painter excites me and that I can be myself when working and what matters more in life than being yourself?

QL: Very true. You seem wise above your years. Talk to me about two of your paintings: 'Come and Go' and 'Evening With Friends'.LL: 'Come and Go' is about how I feel for this beautiful girl I really like. I want her physically-to have sex with her-but I don't want a relationship with her because my feelings are not strong enough for her. One hand is pulling her close, trying to grab a kiss, and the other is pushing her away. The drama of an 18 year old boy. (laughter) 'Evening with Friends' depicts my best friends Philipp, Tristan and Lea who enjoy visiting my studio and one night I just decided to paint them. On the right side, you can see some triangles one on top of the other and the triangles interprets Phillip's voice. He was shouting for some reason while we were all laughing and having fun and just being kids. We spend much time together and these moments mean a lot to me and I very much wanted to capture that youthful specialness, our teenage fun in paint to last forever.QL: Are you ready for your New York show?LL: Yes, I hope so. I'm very exited and anxious to see how the people respond to my paintings and which people I will meet there.QL: Tell me about the title, Träumereien?LL: I believe in English the simplest meaning is dreams. But also it can mean reverie or a fantastic, visionary idea; fanciful musings. All of these wonderful things that are mysterious and exciting at the same time. Like coming to New York to exhibit my paintings. A dream come true.QL: Thank you, Leon. We wish you well. Keep rocking it!LL: Thank you very much, Gregory. See you at the opening.

WHO ON EARTH IS LEON LÖWENTRAUT? | A QUIET LUNCH INTERVIEW

Nov. 4, 2016

We’ve been hearing about him for more than a year. This wunderkinder out of Düsseldorf, Germany, media darling and art world sensation since the age of seven. Multiple sold-out shows in his native land before his sixteenth birthday and by his seventeenth, Leon Löwentraut would take his hyper-expressionist pop paintings overseas for two solo, sold-out exhibitions: one in London, at Knotting Hill’s Muse Gallery, the other in Singapore at Bruno Gallery. And last month in Basel, at Galerie Loeffel, every Löwentraut canvas on the gallery’s walls were scooped-up by collectors within fifteen minutes from the show’s opening. Impressive, indeed.

But who is he? And why does he have over 7000 adoring fans on Facebook and a free, Leon Löwentraut app downloadable in the Apple Store? What’s his shtick? As it turns out, our very own publisher/writer, Gregory de la Haba, was asked to curate this boy wonder’s first stateside exhibition at Avant Garde LES. And since de la Haba loves a good story, he enthusiastically embraced the offer to do so and in the interim find out exactly who, or what, this Leon Löwentraut is made of.

Caro in My Arms | Leon Löwentraut

QL: Hello, Leon. Welcome to New York. Now tell us, please, who you are and when did you start painting?LL: Hello, I am Leon Löwentraut, a painter from Düsseldorf. I started painting at seven years old. My mother, an amateur painter, created these wonderful naturalisitic landscapes and I loved to watch her paint and she was the first to put the paintbrush in my hand. I haven’t stopped painting since.QL: So you started painting early–as a child–but when did you realize you wanted to be an artist?LL: When I was a child, I remember visiting a friend of my grandfather’s who was an artist and walking into his studio and seeing these large canvases with bright colors that I found so amazing and exciting and to this day I never forgot them –although I did forget this artist’s name, sadly. This was around the same time I started painting with my mother and between the experience of being in a real artist’s studio with massive, bright paintings and a mother providing me the tools necessary to begin, I knew very early that I wanted nothing else other than to paint and create works of art on canvas. I’m still learning about being an artist.QL: What is your daily schedule like? School in the morning, painting in the evening?LL: Yes, exactly. I wake every day at 6:30 for school, come home, do homework and then start painting right away, often till very late. Painting is very calming and I enjoy it tremendously. My goal each morning when I wake is to work on one painting each evening. And I do. But I finished school this summer and I feel very good. Now I can concentrate all my power for painting!

Who is the Right one? | Leon Löwentraut

QL: I like that, ‘all my power’. Good for you. Where is your studio, Leon?LL: It is in the cellar of my parent’s home near Düsseldorf at Meerbusch-Büderich.QL: You paint in the cellar of your parent’s home?LL: Yes, why? Is that a problem?QL: No, not at all. I love it. The rumblings in the European press painted you as a spoiled kid and I assumed you probably had a ten thousand square foot studio in Berlin or Leipzig. With assistants to boot.LL: Ha, ha, no. I paint everything myself, thank you, and work at home.QL: Tell me what dead artist you admire and one living artist you admire?

Come and Go | Leon Löwentraut

LL: Well, I admire four dead artists: Picasso, Basquiat, Pollock and Warhol. Each completely different with their own style and attitude and attitude matters a lot to me. I’m not a fan of the drugs Basquiat took but god do I love his attitude, his force in expression on canvas, pure genius, raw genius. With Picasso, I loved most his marketing genius as well as his line. With Pollock, I like that it took him a while to find himself, I find this very hopeful. Unfortunately, he had to drink too much to mask the fact that he didn’t have his unique style early on and that he was insecure, I believe. But when he found his own style he really killed it, yes?QL: He sure did.LL: And with Warhol, I love his erscheinungsbild, how do you say this in English?QL: His appearance?LL: Yes, his appearance, his style and connection with fashion and art, I really like that and admire when someone has the ability to really create their own persona as he did with his trademark wig and glasses plus make art that looked like no one elses before him. Amazing, no?

QL:Totally. And what living artist do you admire?LL: I haven’t met Gerhard Richter yet but he would definitely be my favorite!QL: And I saw that you did meet Julian Schnabel. Was he nice?LL: Yes, he was great. Very nice. I met him when he had his opening in Germany and we talked and traded emails. And I showed him my work. He was very impressed about my pictures for my age and loved also the colors very much.QL: Well that’s impressive to have Julian Schnabel look at your work and have something nice to say about it. Good for you. You carry yourself well, confidently, people see that, are drawn to that and I’m sure has contributed to your tremendous success, no?LL: Yes, but confidence also comes from working hard and this is what I do most.QL: Bingo! A solid work ethic is key to success. But what do you contribute your commercial success to?LL: It’s very rare to sell paintings for certain prices and I also know that it is not normal and I thank god for my luck and I am very thankful about it. Nonetheless, I work very hard all the time and make well thought-out descisions and plans about my career. I’m constantly asking myself and those around me who know better what more I can do better in regards to marketing, selling and what art shows are best for me to participate. I believe people respond to my work and purchase it because I work from my guts, my soul. I’m not creating art to make money and I’d really like to believe people see that and feel it. They enjoy the honesty of my work.

Evening with Friends | Leon Löwentraut

QL: With success come the haters and you seem to have a few. Tell me about the negative press you’ve gotten. Do you care? And, what are they saying about you in Germany?LL: I don’t care about negative press, but sometimes it’s good; people want to read about bad things and they also want to see that successful people collapse. Sometimes they wrote that my parents just want to make me famous which is pure bullshit. My parents care about their son and wish for me to succeed, plain and simple. They do no more or less than what parents of a talented athlete would do for their son or daughter. How many parents around the world are driving their children miles and miles for proper training or to play in competitive games, yes? Or what about musically inclined children and the hours and hours devoted to practice every day? What parent doesn’t wish success for their child? The difference is my parents take me to participate in art shows and exhibitions instead of football games to play. They see how hard I work with my art. I paint everyday. It’s a true passion for me. My critics also say I’m just dreaming and don’t know how the real life is. They’re right. I’m not as old as them (laughs). And they can say whatever they want. I’ll take my dreams over their criticism any day (laughs). It’s all part of the journey, yes, Gregory?QL: It most certainly is, Leon. I commend you for seeing it so lightly and not being negatively affected by it. Tell me what the act of painting means to you? Why do you paint?LL: I paint because it is my passion. I’ll paint for two weeks straight and then it might catch up to me and I’ll get tired and need to rest but when resting I start to get anxious and need to start painting again soon. I’m always thinking about paintings. Another thing, I do not speak very well about my feelings, I tend to be quiet about them in this regard, but in my paintings I find it very easy to express my feelings and emotions. Normally, with friends and family, I am the extrovert. I love to have fun and meet people. But when I paint, I’m a complete introvert and prefer to be left alone to work.QL: When I look at your work, I see expressive linear mark-making –something akin to the way graffiti artists ‘tag’ a wall or a NYC subway train. Tell me about your process, your approach to picture making. Tell me about the layering of paint (oil or acrylic?), tell me about the surface, the ground and how you feel about paint. What turns you on about art and being a painter?LL: When I was a kid between the ages of 6-10, I had many books on graffiti art and I sometimes tried to copy these graffiti lines and styles. I work in acrylic on white primed fabric and usually listen to music and almost always just begin working without much premeditated thought. I just do it. Sometimes I have a subject in mind or a theme or the thought of a girl gets me going and sometimes before I paint I might make a sketch in pencil. But I love to work at night and go right at it. I can honestly say that art and being a painter excites me and that I can be myself when working and what matters more in life than being yourself?

QL: Very true. You seem wise above your years. Talk to me about two of your paintings: ‘Come and Go’ and ‘Evening With Friends’.LL: ‘Come and Go’ is about how I feel for this beautiful girl I really like. I want her physically–to have sex with her–but I don’t want a relationship with her because my feelings are not strong enough for her. One hand is pulling her close, trying to grab a kiss, and the other is pushing her away. The drama of an 18 year old boy. (laughter) ‘Evening with Friends’ depicts my best friends Philipp, Tristan and Lea who enjoy visiting my studio and one night I just decided to paint them. On the right side, you can see some triangles one on top of the other and the triangles interprets Phillip’s voice. He was shouting for some reason while we were all laughing and having fun and just being kids. We spend much time together and these moments mean a lot to me and I very much wanted to capture that youthful specialness, our teenage fun in paint to last forever.QL: Are you ready for your New York show?LL: Yes, I hope so. I’m very exited and anxious to see how the people respond to my paintings and which people I will meet there.QL: Tell me about the title, Träumereien?LL: I believe in English the simplest meaning is dreams. But also it can mean reverie or a fantastic, visionary idea; fanciful musings. All of these wonderful things that are mysterious and exciting at the same time. Like coming to New York to exhibit my paintings. A dream come true.QL: Thank you, Leon. We wish you well. Keep rocking it!LL: Thank you very much, Gregory. See you at the opening.

Peyton Freiman (b. 1983) is either an impressive multitalent, a bit of an operator, or some of both. A Tennessean migrated to Brooklyn, Mr. Freiman is a writer whose words have appeared in the hiply slick the Wild magazine, and an actor appearing in an Austin, Texas-based web series called "Master Class." On screen, Mr. Freiman is mock-nerdy and personable, a mere thorn or two away from qualifying to host "The Daily Show" should Trevor Noah falter. Here, he's a painter-installationist of not inconsiderable ability.

Mr. Freiman's immediately previous offering was a seven-hour exhibition, "Stoned Summer," in a Williamsburg design studio, at which the first 20 people who showed up received "a special gift." The artist has a thing for stoner-surfer culture (or at least a patronizing idea of it -- his website statement says he paints "white stoners without a clue") and has, perforce, covered the gallery floor with beachy sand and plopped in the middle of it the ersatz ruins of a campfire festooned with empty beer cans and plastic cups.

The irony is that Mr. Freiman's faux-street-art paintings -- a colorful cross between punk travel posters and covers for the New Yorker -- are actually pretty good: crisp, bouncy and graphically inventive, even if a bit overstuffed with hand-printed labels. If Mr. Freiman has not yet made a final career choice, visual artist should still be in the running.

We are sad to announce news that our friend, John Margolies passed away on May 26th.

Beginning in the 1970's, John Margolies' outstanding photography of vernacular architecture for 30 years documented over 100,000 miles of main streets, motels, miniature golf courses, billboards, banks, gas pumps, movie palaces and the occasional pink flamingo.

He lectured widely and had exhibitions all over the world. Shooting with a 35mm Canon, his trips across the country were sponsored by Guggenheim Grants, and his friends, Philip Johnson and Asher Edelman. The result was thousands of images and numerous publications.

Much of what he photographed no longer exists, but what remains are whimsical and unsentimental images of America.

"The John Margolies archive of photographs of American roadside architecture is acknowledged as the most comprehensive study of this subject extant."

Leanne MellaVisual Arts Program SpecialistUnited States Department of State

"This is a forgotten portion of the great American architectural heritage, and John Margolies is perhaps the leading historian in this field.... It is vital for us ... to see America through his eyes."

Philip Johnson, The End of the Road

"Some people are obsessed with collecting Louis XIV furniture, others with beer cans or butterflies. John Margolies is obsessed with the architectural flora and fauna of American main streets, roadsides, movie theaters and resort areas--the exotic, improvisational, outrageous furnishings of the great open spaces. In the process he has helped preserve a portion of our common heritage by documenting thousands of buildings, many of them just months or even days before the bulldozers were to carry them away for good."

'Yes, call it kitsch if you must,' Margolies snorts, fondling a novelty demitasse cup. 'But I really don't enjoy that word. "Kitsch" was invented by intellectuals--as an excuse for not thinking about something.'"

Having seen this extraordinary exhibition at my friend Shin's gallery, I can recommend you read Robert Morgan's review and visit the gallery. It's rare to see work so striking, expressive and visually boundless.

The terror incited by the sight of heads rolling down the plank of a guillotine one after another is difficult to conjure in the 21st century. However, at one time, in addition to providing the public with a spectacle, the motive behind chopping off heads was to contain the threat of an uprising or, worse, an organized revolution. Whether in Europe, Britain, or the Middle East, the process of decapitating or dismembering human bodies wielded a fortuity of iconic power. The seriousness of the debacle was quantified by the headcount lay to rest in the pile at the end of the plank.

Detail of Hyon Gyon, “Headcount” (2016)

Emotional Drought, the current exhibition at Shin Gallery on the Lower East Side, is the latest in a triad of exhibitions by Korean-born painterHyon Gyon. Its focus is a large, freestanding painting/installation titled “Headcount” (2016) and situated diagonally in the middle of this storefront gallery. A taut, expressionist image of a raging female shaman appears to have usurped the function of the guillotine. Positioned off the floor on a wooden platform, the shamanist matriarch is surrounded by 300 oil-painted heads, each on it own cotton, hand-sewn pillow. In addition to the major pile, there is another wooden crate with heads to drive home the point. A small, gold-fringed banner hangs in front of the display reading: “God told me to hate you.”

Each head painting is unique, thus suggesting a massive execution, perhaps over a long period of time. It is difficult to know whether the heads were separately imagined by the artist or metaphorically observed in the workplace as in the general line of cultural production, where often-vile competition replaces inspiration and self-fulfillment. Some of these presumably deposed physiognomies appear male, others female, and still others androgynous. The style of these deceptively paltry pillow paintings is rigorously expressionist, but less manic than the invidious, bare-breasted shaman who rises up from her spoils.

Detail of Hyon Gyon, “Headcount” (2016)

In the exhibition’s press release, the artist suggests these heads represent those circumscribed by media. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that each painting is given the gentility of a soft fabric cushion yet is inevitably isolated, an appropriate metaphor for the current art world. Ironically, it raises the question: If the art media are the culprits, what is the role of the shaman? Is she a symbol of the pervasiveness of media? Or is she the protectorate of those “decapitated” in the pile below? The ambiguity is interesting. To the artist’s credit, she does not attempt to literalize the narrative. What we do know is that shamanism came to the Korean peninsula 5,000 years ago, undoubtedly by way of Mongolia. Throughout the dynasties, from 57 BCE to 1910 CE, shamanism maintained a presence as the essential religion in Korea, which gradually changed after the Occupation (1910–45) and the advent of the so-called Korean War.

In addition to “Headcount,” three other paintings are included in the exhibition. Installed on the back and side walls, they are collectively titled “Harlem Gold 1, 2, and 3” (all 2015). Each painting is vertically positioned on the walls, with gold, silver, and copper leaf generously applied to each canvas and automatist scribbles etched into the varied surfaces. In fact, the three canvases are quite similar to one another, with the gold leaf dominating, particularly in the lower and upper thirds of the paintings. Mysteriously, somehow, these paintings (done last summer at Hyon’s former studio in Harlem) suggest a kind of necessary decorum, a countervailing innocence, perhaps, used to augment the overall impact of the artist’s indulgent obsession with a modular “headcount.”

Hyon Gyon, “Harlem Gold 1, 2, and 3” (all 2015)

The power of the central installation — in fact, the entire space — is staggering, largely due to the emotional structure being dispelled through the re-evocation of a shamanist presence. It suggests that it may be time to bring shamanism back into our thoughts and emotions. In doing so, we might consider “shamanizing” the virtual aspects of our “global environment” that are becoming increasingly abstract and distant from how we actually think and feel.

The overall message I glean from Hyon’s Emotional Drought is to suggest another way of seeing outside the specter of a universalist paranoia. Traditionally, the role of the shaman is about coming to terms with those unreflective indulgences and invisible traumas that media appear to either repress or disguise. To confront the absurd, massive pile of heads is to retrieve the sense of being human in the process of one’s work and, indeed, one’s life.

New York, NY — Edelman Arts in collaboration with The Durst Organization and The Port Authority of NY & NJ presents a public art collection curated for One World Trade Center. One World Trade Center marks the beginning of a new future in the landscape of New York architecture in itself, but also in collaboration with the spirit of art and with it, the diversity of people in this great city. The collection includes a monumental painting by José Parlá, two paintings by Doug Argue, two paintings by Fritz Bultman, a group of seven works on canvas by Greg Goldberg, and a towering sculpture by Bryan Hunt. The collection will remain on view in the North, South, and Sixty Fourth floor lobbies of One World Trade Center, where the installations will be enjoyed by a projected 30,000 visitors per day.

In January, One World Trade Center debuted seven paintings by Greg Goldberg on its 64th-floor sky lobby, a reception and events area in the building that, as we spoke about them last week, was being filled with chairs for some kind of press conference by the BBC.

“Popular floor,” Goldberg said, smiling.

The seven works in his World Trade Center series are oil on linen, each five and a half feet by six feet, with wavy abstract color samplings that Goldberg describes as having been “woven” together over 16 to 18 layers in each work. Like the sky lounge, Goldberg’s studio in Connecticut, where he worked on the paintings in pairs, faces north, and the light on the 64th floor feels a part of the composition.

The suite, which was made for the space, is installed in a long row, with one on each end of the room and then a cluster of two and a cluster of three along a wall between them. The latter two groups might be considered diptychs or triptychs, though all seven works could be said to work together. “This is the first time I’ve had to think about them as a totality,” Goldberg said. Normally he works on them individually.

Edelman Arts curated the sky lobby, and Goldberg’s proposal for the commission was apparently pretty vague, by necessity. “The colors are determined by the prior colors,” he said. He goes with the flow of the paintings as they develop. So he was happy to have the leniency.

The next time you’re at One World Trade, you should swing by! In the meantime, check out this slide show of the paintings.

The artists commissioned to create works for One World Trade Center were given only one guideline by the developers: The work had to be unifying. There's no mention of the site's history, but all the artists understood they had to somehow live up to it, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason.

Many of the 104 floors of the new World Trade Center are vacant. The tenants are still moving in, but the art is up on the walls.

In the sky lobby of the 64th floor, with its panoramic views of New York City, Gregory Goldberg has carefully positioned his series of seven paintings, and Brian Hunt has assembled his airship-inspired sculpture.

"I just wanted something weightless and gravity free," Hunt said.

The five artists chosen by consultant Asher Edelman are all American.

"The mission was to get people to turn their phones off and look up," Edelman said. "It had to be a wake-up call. But not about the building; about itself."

The showpiece is a massive mural in the south lobby. Titled "Union of the Senses," it's believed to be the largest painting in the city, 90 feet long by 14.5 feet tall, said artist Jose Parla.

It was at a meeting where he discussed painting the masterpiece.

"I said,' I can do it. Let's do it,"' Parla said.

He said as an artist, being commissioned to paint a picture for the iconic building is the biggest honor, but a monumental responsibility.

Parla said he knew exactly what he wanted to paint.

"I'd been thinking about it. I'd dreamt about it. It absorbed all 24 hours of every day before I even started," he said.

For 10 months straight, the 42-year-old painter worked on the project in his Brooklyn studio. Parla also has murals in the Barclays Center (arena) in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but his piece for One World Trace Center, a celebration of diversity, would be his biggest in both size and symbolism. Parla's graffiti-like calligraphy swirl's across its surface.

"I would be up on top of a ladder and as far as my arms would reach, I would do the writing. And when I got to the actual point, I would position my feet on the ladder comfortably, then jump off," he said.

Sometimes the momentum literally threw him out the door.

"This was the most physical piece I've ever done and I wanted to keep that energy," he said.

In the otherwise austere skyscraper, his mural is an explosion of color. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge admired it on a visit, and Taylor Swift posted a photo of it to Instagram.

"I kept thinking of all my best work that I find are my favorite works, I thought to myself, 'You gotta go beyond that,"' Parla said. "'You gotta work hard . You gotta put all you have into this and make it your best, best painting."'

He said he feels like he's accomplished that.

When the observation deck opens this Spring, Parla's mural will be seen by some 20,000 people expected to pass through the lobby of the World Trade Center every day. That's more than visit New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Curating at One World Trade Center is a plum assignment, but treacherous. To get it right, the Durst Organization (real estate heavyweights celebrating their centenary with 13 million square feet under management) and the Port Authority (notorious for its chronic tin ear in aesthetic matters) brought in dealer and deal-maker Asher Edelman of Edelman Arts, who set up the art leasing company Artemus to help him manage the task.

Even during construction, Edelman started commissioning site-specific paintings and a sculpture, including what is purported to be the largest painting in New York. The colorful whopper in the ground floor lobby is by José Parlá. It is joined by two more subtle paintings by Doug Argue, two knockout works by Abstract Expressionist Fritz Bultman, and, in the 64th-floor lobby, a suite of seven square paintings by Greg Goldberg along with a ripe new Bryan Hunt sculpture.

After a royal visit in December by Prince William and Kate and a preview for art scene A-listers in February, the public art collection can now be viewed by 30,000 or so daily visitors, some of them just settling into their new Condé Nast offices.

In almost any other office building in any world capital, the collection would be remarkable if not exactly triumphant, but 1WTC makes demands that test our faith in the power of art itself. That is just the sort of challenge that is a red cape in front of the horns of the audacious Edelman, a leading collector of contemporary art and antiquities from decades ago who went pro and runs a gallery near Union Square as well as the new, innovative art leasing concern.

He has courted controversy as a Wall Street “activist investor” (read “raider’), as an outspoken critic of the auction houses as “overreaching,” as the founder of a private museum in Switzerland where he curated the largest Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition ever, and as a professor in Columbia’s MBA program, which landed him on page one of the Timesin the first week of the semester for offering his class a cash bonus if they presented a takeover target. (This once scandalous incentive is now common at Stanford.) Fortunately for 1 WTC and the Dursts, he has an elegant eye as well as balls.

The curatorial strategy leads with abstraction, using high color to counterpunch not just history but the bland, arctic expanses of white marble and sheetrock of the rhetorically styled “Freedom Tower.” Three of the four artists at the opening used the word “difficult” to describe the boring spaces in which the art had to be hung. Parla’s monumentally exuberant Union of the Senses (a 90-foot-long chromatic fantasy in acrylic, gesso, ink, enamel and plaster on board) is a high-decibel salsa soundtrack better suited to the Barclay’s Center arena, where he is also featured.

It echoes a notch too loudly in a Speer-like cavernous lobby so narrow you can barely step away to see it, although some of its layering rewards close looking. A more cerebral effect is offered by Doug Argue’s two cosmological paintings (Randomly Placed Exact Percentages and Isotropic), ambitious in scale yet delicate in touch. Like the coursing light of the illuminated square fountains in the memorial just north of the building, they flicker with the pulse of philosophical inquiry characteristic of his work. Arguably not the most apt choice for ramparts high above an elevator bank, where the hurried refrain of “hold the door” echoes, their embedded texts require close reading from a still point. It is a star turn on an international stage, though, for an artist who bears watching (including at the Venice Biennial starting in May).

Isotropic" by Doug Argue, 2009-2013. Oil on canvas, 9.5 x 13.5 inches

The absolute highlight of the collection, packing the kind of lyric power that nearly redeems the prosaic architecture as well as the awful feng shui of the place, are the two big-hearted Bultman triptychs that unleash an operatic cri de coeur over the sterile typography of the chrome Condé Nast signage. Rescued from obscurity by Edelman in a recent exhibition and in this high-profile installation, Bultman is himself a story worthy of Vanity Fair.

Respected by Pollock and De Kooning, the favorite pupil of Hans Hofmann, best man at Robert Motherwell’s wedding to Helen Frankenthaler, literary fodder for his friend Tennessee Williams, Bultman was a star of the AbEx first generation. He skipped the photo shoot for the famous 1951 Irascibles group portrait for a trip to Europe, and this in part accounts for why he has not assumed his rightful position among those paint-slingers of New York’s titanic moment. Any viewer of Gravity of Nightfalland Blue Triptych can see his importance, even from too many feet behind the reception desk.

Among the many lessons Bultman learned from Hofmann, the building of a positive instead of recessive pictorial space is the compositional coup that makes these paintings so effective on the massive white marble walls. They project their brooding vision with a fullness that is as brilliant as the artist, a thinker (like Motherwell) whose reading embraced James Joyce, Hart Crane, Oswald Spengler and C.G. Jung. You can sense in the paintings that he would have comprehended the depth of significance of offering a painting in a place steeped in tragedy.

Bultman’s grandsons Tristan and Gwyther were on hand for the opening, and pointed out that their mother, Bethany, was a contributing editor at House and Garden, one of Condé Nast’s premier magazines. Long identified with his native New Orleans and the Provincetown arts scene in its heyday, the artist also lived on the Upper East Side in nearly daily contact with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Lindner and Giorgio Cavallon. “Friz has returned home,” Tristan observed, as he reminisced about playing in the Condé conference room as a child.

Up on floor 64 the aesthetic air thins. Goldberg’s seven brightly colored canvases gamely face a bank of picture windows with drop-dead views of midtown. Goldberg cased the room as raw space, and took as his tonic keys the primary colors (two gestural paintings are based on red, two on yellow and three on blue). “I punched up these really strong colors so the physical presence of the paintings would not get lost,” the artist remarked.

Bryan Hunt’s Axis Mundi is a slightly paunchy, purple version of the streamlined Brancusian airships for which he became known. Backlit, the translucent papery skin reveals an intriguing substructure of wooden girders, and the bulbous base is stylishly organic. The palette is glowing (the burgundy is in the same family as some of the warmer violets in the Bultman and Parla paintings below), and the effect is at least blood-warm (which cannot be said of the architecture).

Hunt was cheered on at the opening by his friends and East End neighbors Eric Fischl (who, as some might recall, struck out on his own ill-advised Rodinesque cut at a 9/11 commemoration). Along with many major collectors and curators, Anita Durst, who chairs the board of the nonprofit Chashama, was also on hand as Edelman charmed the festive crowd, banging back Prosecco and canapes, with a brief recollection of walking along a wooden scaffolding in the unfinished sky lobby as he scoped out the project.

“I don’t like heights,” he admitted. “We wanted to accomplish something elegant and meaningful, a return to people looking at art, looking up from their devices.”

The dreadful qi of the place lingered unspoken. Abstraction (as in absolute music, by contrast with commemoration) is one way for aesthetics to make a stand against the curse of a place so weighted with disaster. Some art plays on the drama (a visit by this critic to Ai Wei Wei’s Alcatraz installation a week later brought home the difficult imbalance between artifice and real suffering). Bleaching a site in monumental white stone is not the answer, either, as a visit to Tiananmen Square can prove.

Just outside the windows, the usually magical Santiago Calatrava’s over-budget transit building looked expensive but just pretty, and a spotlit Jeff Koons balloon piece in the plaza of 7 WTC (predating Edelman’s project) was banal to the point of being an insult. The trouble is that for those who lost somebody at the World Trade Center, only the power of truly great art (the Bultman paintings?) stood a chance.

As Shakespeare asked in sonnet 65, “How with this rage can beauty hold a plea, whose action is no stronger than a flower?”

BASIC FACTS: The art collection at One World Trade Center is open to the public. The building is located at 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10006. The collection features 13 works of art curated by Asher Edelman of Edelman Arts.

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Charles Riley II, PhD, is an arts journalist, curator and professor at the City University of New York. He is the author of thirty-one books on art, architecture and public policy. Upcoming books include Echoes of the Jazz Age and Sacred Sister (in collaboration with Robert Wilson). His articles on art have appeared in Art & Auction, FlashArt, Art & Antiques, Antiques and Fine Art. He has written over a hundred exhibition catalogue essays.

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Copyright 2015 Hamptons Art Hub LLC. All rights reserved.

Original Link: http://hamptonsarthub.com/2015/02/28/art-review-power-of-art-succeeds-in-one-world-trade-center-art-collection/